Posts tagged “Interrogation”

Storytelling is comprised of two separate stories set against the sadly comical terrain of college and high school, past and present. Following the paths of its young hopeful, troubled characters, it explores issues of sex, race, celebrity and exploitation…

2001 – Certificate: 18 – USA 7.5 out of 10

On the walls in my office at work are maps of the eight counties that make up the South East of England. (By the way, I’m not looking now to debate if Sussex is one or two counties, or if the Isle of Wight is one or not, so if you don’t like the number I’ve come up with please feel free to substitute your own; and anyway, I haven’t actually put up the maps for two of them yet, as there’re some old filing cabinets in the way that someone was meant to have got rid of ages ago but hasn’t). The point of them is so when someone rings and starts talking about a detail of his/her tiny village somewhere, I have a chance of actually being able to find it quickly, seeing where it is relative to other places and not sound like I don’t have an intimate knowledge of every part of the 7,373 square miles of the South East. The latter seems to be what most people assume and then get all defensive about when I ask something like, “where exactly is Deeping Minor?” Near the edges of these maps is written stuff that I simply translate as “here be dragons”. I believe these to be blasted, post apocalyptic wastelands, inhabited by mutants, aliens and huge, people-eating monsters. I never go there but I’m pretty sure that’s what it’s like. (Okay, London runs along much of the top of the maps, but really, it’s so small and anyway in its own way it’s full of even weirder stuff.) I have a new boss at work, my fifth in under seven years; (I guess I must be a nightmare to manage). I had to go and visit him last week in his village, a place called Norwich. This is so far away it wasn’t even on the maps. I thought you just fell off the edge of the world if you went that far, but apparently not. The journey took days. It started on a (fairly) modern train and ended with an uncomfortable trip in the open wagon of a local journeyman, who spoke a strange Middle Earth dialect and was selling reeds for thatching; (he was probably a mutant too, but I didn’t like to ask). On reaching my destination I was confronted by a small, blue hut by a muddy river. I was ushered into a tiny room with a cup of some weird, local beverage, where my new manager was waiting. With hindsight, I believe the drink to have included some sort of witch-doctor truth serum. My new manager is a giant, at least thirty feet tall, which somewhat confirmed my suspicions about the conditions to be found beyond the South East. Ever heard or read stories about people confessing to crimes they didn’t commit? I used to think they must be very weak-minded. However, after my long journey and then over 20 hours of non-stop interrogation about what we do in the South East, work-wise, I was ready to agree to anything, just to get away. For some reason I now find myself with financial targets even ExxonMobil would be happy to achieve, so I guess I’m going to be a real bitch-from-hell manager to my team this year. This film is also about telling stories and interpreting life though the prism of a parallel, fictional narrative; or something.

This darkly funny movie is actually two films joined together. One features the students in a creative writing class and the other a would-be documentary maker. They don’t have anything to do with one another, except that push the overall point of the film along, which seems to be to highlight the hypocrisy of how people react to different things, based on how society perceives them rather than simply as a reaction to absolutely how good or bad they are. This is a very dense film in the sense that there’s a real mesh of subtexts and other stuff under its surface. I recommend Goolging it if you want to find out more about them. However, simply on a superficial level, (which is where I generally spend my time), the movie works. It provides plenty of nuanced, flawed characters for us to like, despise, relate to or misunderstand; a set of dysfunctional people trying to do more (and sometimes less), than they’re capable of and failing to realise, whilst getting lost in maze of political correctness and self-importance. Well worth watching, especially for the ‘did he/she just say/do that?’ moments. I watched the uncensored version; that’s the one that doesn’t have the big red rectangle over the ‘rude bits’, which itself was used as a statement by the Director.

Recommended for people who enjoy seeing others fail; not so good for the less-than-liberal middle-classes, who find anything less that PC perfection to be on a level equivalent to the Holocaust.

1 cat, no chainsaws or decapitations. A lovely grey and black stripy cat gets a brief bit of ‘lap-action’, but overall I felt it was very underutilised. A wasted opportunity.

Top badass moment? I’m not for a moment suggesting it’s something anyone else should look to emulate and she was a bit of a nutter on the quiet, but Consuelo’s way of dealing with unemployment was an interesting and radical departure from the norm. A definite bit of thinking outside the box badassness.

Cacti Fertiliser

Cacti Germination Dates

No One is Innocent

No One is Innocent

Find Flowers in the Desert

Gain Full Access to the Truth

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